If you’re a busy professional, you may find it helpful to create a shortcut to email a recipient directly from your desktop. This will save you time and energy, and it can also be useful if you need to quickly send an email without having to go through the entire process of sending an email, opening it, reading it, and then responding. To create a shortcut on your desktop:

  1. Open the Start menu and type “cmd” (without the quotes).
  2. Type “xargs” (without the quotes) and press enter.
  3. Type “netstat -an” (without the quotes) and press enter.
  4. If there is an email address associated with that netstat output, it will be listed in the resulting text field; otherwise, nothing will happen. If you want to send an email using this shortcut instead of going through the entire process of sending an email, simply copy and paste the following into your message body: Hi there! I just created a shortcut for you that will send you an email when something interesting happens on my computer."

Right click anywhere on the desktop and go to New Shortcut.

Now in the Create Shortcut window type in “mailto:yourcontact@email.com” of course you will put in your contact’s email.  So for instance if I wanted to create on to email The Geek I would put in the following and hit Next.

Next name the shortcut something so you will remember what it’s for and click on Finish.

Because it is an email and Outlook is my default email client, Vista associates an Outlook style icon for the shortcut.  I am not sure how it will look with different clients but you can always Change the Desktop Icon.  Now anytime the shortcut is launched your default email program will open up with the recipients email address already filled in.

  

If you want to send the email off to multiple contacts then just separate each email address with a semi-colon.  Hopefully this time saver will be useful to somebody out there!